This white paper presents IDC's analysis of current quality and defect amelioration strategies and market trends, and it offers guidance for best practice approaches. It also provides findings from a recent IDC survey as context for this analysis. During 2Q08, IDC conducted a survey of 139 North American companies that forms the basis for data analyzed in this paper. IT management, IT operations, and software development represented 86% of those responding (with 50% being in IT management). Some of the areas explored include:

- Code base complexity compared to 2 years ago- Frequency of production application updates- Code Review / quality strategies- # of critical bugs found within 12 months of release- # of days to correct a defect in the field

In the context of the above findings, IDC then briefly looks at the product offerings of Coverity, an automated source code analysis tools vendor. Coverity Thread Analyzer for Java, which was released in 2Q08, observes code as it is executed and identifies race conditions and deadlocks.